THE 1989 ELECTIONS: THE NEW YORK VOTE; Almost Lost at the Wire

David N. Dinkins nearly lost New York City's mayoral election on Tuesday because wavering Democrats surged to Rudolph W. Giuliani in the volatile closing days of a campaign that revealed deep racial divisions among the voters.

The errant late-deciders, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls, were particularly troubled by revelations concerning Mr. Dinkins's personal finances -a cumulative issue that the Democratic candidate was forced to confront again on the very eve of the voting.

If, as Gov. Mario M. Cuomo had said, the mayoral election represented a referendum on negative campaigning, then negative campaigning nearly won, but largely because Mr. Giuliani's critical television commercials rang true to many voters.

One-fourth of all Giuliani voters said reports about Mr. Dinkins's financial affairs had caused them to change their vote, a New York Times/WCBS-TV Poll on Election Day found. But among the late-comers to his campaign, nearly 4 in 10 said the reports had swayed them.

Yet it was difficult to gauge the extent to which that and other variables represented a rationale for white Democrats who were disinclined to support a black candidate. The Times/ WCBS survey found that 9 in 10 blacks voted for Mr. Dinkins and 7 in 10 whites supported Mr. Giuliani.

Even when surveys of voters leaving polling places miss the margins of victory, as most did Tuesday in projecting a greater Dinkins victory than materialized, the data they provide about voter attitudes and the characteristics of candidates' supporters can still be relied on, polling experts say.

''You'll never know what part of it was race because of the effects of negativism,'' Mr. Cuomo said yesterday. ''If you couldn't point to the stock certificates or the tax returns or the trip to France,'' he said, referring to some of Mr. Dinkins's financial problems, ''then you'd have to say it was race. The Republicans, with their negativism, spared New York that judgment.''

Andrew Cuomo, the Governor's son and a Dinkins adviser, agreed that ''there's no doubt that Rudy's negative campaigning took its toll.''

Maybe, said Norman Adler, a political consultant to Local 237 of the Teamsters union, which supported Mr. Dinkins from the start. ''It's very nice not to have to fall back on race if you could find something else,'' he said.

''Brute race,'' said Richard C. Wade, a professor of urban history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. ''Party doesn't count, but what does count is an unpleasant fact of life in New York: there were reasons to vote against Dinkins, but what reasons were there to vote for Giuliani?'' That was a point echoed by several political consultants, who said that Mr. Giuliani had squandered more than one opportunity to transform himself into a more credible alternative.

Mr. Dinkins's margin of less than three percentage points was the slimmest in a New York City mayoral race since 1905, when George B. McClellan Jr. defeated William Randolph Hearst. The 'Bradley Factor'

Some political figures attributed the disparity between pre-election public opinion polls and the actual returns to white Democrats who had been unwilling to acknowledge to pollsters that they opposed a black Democratic candidate.

David Garth, chief political strategist for Mayor Edward I. Koch, whom Mr. Dinkins defeated in the Sept. 12 primary, attributed the gap to what in polling argot has become known as ''the Bradley Factor.'' It is named for Tom Bradley, the Los Angeles Mayor, who is black. He lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election by less than one percentage point, although he had a healthy lead in polls before the election and was ahead even in voter surveys conducted on Election Day.

A similar disparity was not apparent when Mr. Dinkins won the nomination - in part, because Democratic primary voters are considered more liberal than the November electorate.

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Indeed, some people suggested that Mr. Dinkins might have won as many votes because he is black - from blacks as well as from whites to whom racial harmony was a priority - as he lost.

''The racial issue was a wash,'' said Meyer Frucher, a former state official and Dinkins adviser.

About one-third of Jewish voters said they favored Mr. Dinkins on Tuesday - double the percentage of white Catholics who said they did so. The figures varied some from poll to poll. The Times/WCBS survey, for instance, found that 18 percent of white Catholics said they had voted for Mr. Dinkins. But the percentage ranged from 14 percent in a Daily News/WABC-TV survey to 23 percent in one taken for New York Newsday and WNBC-TV.

About 55 percent of all voters turned out Tuesday, although the percentage soared past 65 percent in some predominantly black neighborhoods, where Mr. Dinkins exceeded his showing in the mayoral primary as well as the Rev. Jesse Jackson's totals in last year's presidential primary. Defections to Giuliani

Blacks constituted about 28 percent of the total turnout - a substantially higher percentage than their share of registered voters. Jews customarily make up a smaller percentage of the turnout in the general election than in the Democratic primary, and white Catholics represent a larger one.

He carried, just barely, the Bedford Park, Belmont and Pelham Parkway sections of the Bronx, represented by Assemblyman George Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader, and the Flatbush and Park Slope district in Brooklyn, represented by Assembly Speaker Mel Miller, a Democrat. In the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, represented by Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who corraled the Hasidic community for Mr. Giuliani, he won by 5 to 1. Mr. Dinkins lost Forest Hills and Kew Gardens in Queens by 3 to 1.

''I guess we were wrong on the Jews,'' said Mr. Adler, the political consultant, who had hoped Mr. Dinkins would do better. The Times/WCBS survey found that 4 in 10 Jewish voters favored Mr. Dinkins, but that support was not necessarily discernible from the actual tallies in selected districts. 'I'm Sorry I Voted for Him'

Martin Lewis, a Brooklyn Jew who said he had voted for Mr. Dinkins, said yesterday that he was regretting it because of the candidate's reference in his victory speech to Mr. Jackson. ''When I heard what he had to say about Jesse Jackson, about him being a national healer, I'm storry that I voted for him,'' Mr. Lewis said. ''For Jews like me, that was the wrong thing to say.''

Mr. Dinkins won the votes of nearly 7 in 10 Hispanic voters, a better showing than expected. Dennis Rivera, president of Local 1199 of the hospital workers union, said it should put to rest the perception of divisions between the black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

''The message that those who face the same socioeconomic problems should work together is reaching home,'' Mr. Rivera said.

The narrow margin, though, prompted some hand-wringing at Dinkins headquarters Tuesday night and some second-guessing yesterday by the Giuliani campaign. That the last New York City mayoral candidate who lost and later ran for governor was Mr. Cuomo might provide solace, if not inspiration, for Mr. Giuliani, particularly if Mr. Cuomo decides not to seek re-election next year.

If Mr. Dinkins was deprived of what others might view as a mandate, he did not seem to mind.

On Tuesday night, as the returns were being reported, he sipped a class of ice water at his victory party on the 21st floor of the Sheraton Centre, and observed that the key to his election was his ''good fortune to work with people who let me be myself.''

''Granted the margin is not 5 or 10 points, but it is a winning margin,'' he said yesterday. ''The broader the margin, the easier the task. But sooner or later, People who supported Giuliani are going to arrive at the conclusion that for the next four years he is not going to be mayor.''

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A version of this an analysis; news analysis appears in print on November 9, 1989, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: THE 1989 ELECTIONS: THE NEW YORK VOTE; Almost Lost at the Wire. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe